For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does -- torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it -- will ever be brought to court. For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable. The only crimes that can now be committed in official Washington are by those foolish enough to believe that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.…
Then price of empire is the loss of the nation's soul.
Probably nothing that you don't know already, but it's staggering to see it totaled up.
And it has amounted to naught except the immiseration of many to feed the greed of a few.
TomDispatch.comProbably nothing that you don't know already, but it's staggering to see it totaled up.
And it has amounted to naught except the immiseration of many to feed the greed of a few.
Despite much talk about the rise of a multi-polar world, this still remains in many ways a unipolar one, which perhaps means that the wounds Washington has suffered on numerous fronts in these last years are self-inflicted.
Just what kind of decline this represents remains to be seen. What does seem clearer today is that the rise of the national security state and the triumphalism of the corporate sector (along with the much publicized growth of great wealth and striking inequality in the country) has been accompanied by a decided diminution in the power of the government to function domestically and of the imperial state to impose its will anywhere on Earth.
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Age of Impunity
Tom Englehart
5 comments:
Does someone want to make a historical case that there was a time when these things did not happen? Do you think people weren't tortured during the cold war? Or during all the other wars?
I don't recall any record of Americans torturing people on this scale and level of sophistication, or of this level of surveillance and militarization of domestic security forces, or presidents claiming the executive power to order assassinations of American citizens, or "indefinite detention," for that matter.
Could it have happened? Maybe. But on this scale and level of approval and organization, I find doubtful.
However, what is really new is the president claiming these powers that are clearly dictatorial.
Of course Americans did torture fellow Americans and even killed them with impunity during slavery, just as feudal lords were permitted to maintain their own gallows for their subjects.
BTW, does the war on drugs count as a war? Is long term solitary confinement torture?
We are supposed to be better than this. This is a moral rot that needs to be extirpated, and it's also a very dangerous trend politically and legally for the future of the republic.
Even considered pragmatically, it's undermining US soft power. The US did not have a reputation for this prior to the Bush/Cheney administration, which Obama campaigned on ending (for which he was awarded the Nobel prematurely) and instead he extended and amplified it.
US presidents have routinely claimed these powers during wars. The only thing that is newish is the idea that the endless GWOT mish-mash is a war. In the cold war, the really nasty stuff happened behind the wall of national security and espionage secrecy so the horrors weren't as directly exposed to public awareness and criticism.
It doesn't help when people romanticize some pristine republic that never existed.
False equivalence, IMHO.
Yes, there were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which met with strong criticism and were allowed to expire in 1800 and 1801. The Alien Enemies Act was also passed in 1942 and remains on the books.
It's general knowledge that the CIA conducted black ops and they remained largely black. Certainly no president or vice-president was bragging about this.
Perhaps you know your American history better than I do and can cite sources that are comparable to the level and scale today. I don't see it.
The McCarthy era of domestic commie hunts and Hoover's big brother FBI weren't model pictures of democracy. And the CIA blundered. Alot. For the technology of the day, they were significant. Today the same hubris and lawlessness exists in Washington but the technology enables the bureaucrats and criminals to do it on a much larger scale.
I don't think most Americans understood or cared about most of what Snowden disclosed. I find today's ability to automatically record phone calls by the billion, automatically translate, transcibe and index the conversation and meta data, store permanent records of your phone's and auto's location data so the government can query who has said the word al quaeda in any of 100 languages and been to a particular place. It's powerful. The microphones in most cars can now be monitored without your knowledge too by satellite without warrant. If they can monitor all your internet activity, all of your financial activity, fly drones to kill, create media spin, along with well organized domestic security forces, I seriously doubt we could ever have unrest like we had in 1960s again. Times have changed. There are many things comparable today to history but no denying that Hoover would have wet himself to have today's tools to carry out his extortion gig.
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